Man Laws

If you’re looking for a great book to help navigate a midlife crisis, check out “Men in Midlife Crisis”. Here’s a short review.

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One thing I learned while living in Tuscaloosa was how important it was for college football coaches to work for certain people. There are coaches that everybody wants to work for. Guys like Nick Saban, Urban Meyer of Florida, Bobby Bowden formerly of Florida State, Joe Paterno of Penn Sate, and Mac Brown of Texas. Up and coming assistant coaches will move their families all over the country to work for one these coaches.  Sometimes knowing that it will mean 80+ hour work weeks, tons of traveling, and no guarantee of having a job next season.  Even with all this, they still choose to do it. So what can the average guy learn from this?

Find something you love to do.College football coaches don’t all make $4 million per year. In fact, it’s only been in the last 4 years that anybody other than the top 5 guys were making big dollars. Everybody else worked for salaries that were barely minimum wage when you counted up all the hours they worked. Coaches coach because they love it. They love working with and developing young men and you need to find something you love to do.

Find out who the top guys are in your field. For example, if you’re programmer you’d probably like to work at Google. Most programmers don’t start there, so find out the people who used to work at Google and now are somewhere else. That’s who you want to work for. Begin the climb up the ladder.

Throughout your career, always remember it matters who you’ve worked with. I used to hire people and one of the things that made a resume move to the top of the stack was seeing that they had worked for good folks. Some people might call this a good old boy network but it’s not. It’s simply that if a person was good enough to get hired by someone I respected, then I wanted to talk to him/her.

Learn everything you can when you’re working for a successful guy. A great illustration of this is the new Tennessee coach, Derek Dooley. He holds the record for the longest tenure working for Nick Saban, seven years. Now he’s heading a major program and you can see the similarities everywhere. From the way he talked during his introductory press conference, to the way he promotes his program. I heard Coach Dooley say in an interview that one of the main reasons he stayed with Coach Saban so long was because he wanted to learn the entire system.

Lastly, have a goal to one day be the guy everybody wants to work for. You’ll get to work with the best and get the satisfaction of seeing them succeed later on in life.

But the big idea is do everything possible to be selective about who you work for.

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